


Letters To Malcor III

by Larathia



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-27
Updated: 2012-08-27
Packaged: 2017-11-13 00:17:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/497272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Larathia/pseuds/Larathia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bit of a look at a one-shot character; Mirasta Yale from the epsiode "First Contact".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters To Malcor III

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doseki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doseki/gifts).



Normality is relative.

Mirasta Yale made her way along the corridors of Starfleet Headquarters, offering a small, delighted smile to everyone she passed. That delight was often infectious, though none but herself understood the cause; that being on another world, light-years from her home, seeing hundreds of new species - sometimes in a single day - would be delightful, an opening of her world.

After all, being light-years from home and dealing with perhaps hundreds of unknown species in a day was just... _Starfleet_ , to everyone else. It was the job. It was _normal_.

She wasn't even the only cultural refugee, though she was at least of a much _smaller_ grouping there. A few - say, a dozen or so - had, like her, come from worlds who'd undergone a limited First Contact and decided that they really just weren't ready, as a planet, to deal with a broader universe yet. Some _had_ undergone First Contact but had quickly decided it was a mistake and become insular worlds, content to just explore their own solar systems or nearby, uninhabited worlds. Mirasta had come to understand just what Captain Picard had meant when he discussed the ways in which First Contact could go badly.

And so she had come to Earth, to the center of Starfleet, to join a First Contact Commission that was supposed to help streamline the process, and result in less culture shock for the new exploring worlds, and less physical danger for contacting Starfleet crews.

She understood that this was the aliens' way of helping her to feel useful. She didn't mind, not really, but she often wondered what good they thought she could do in the role. After all, she had dealt with First Contact issues personally, and really didn't see how you could _make_ somene like Minister Krola see something he didn't want to see.

She'd always just tried shouting. It didn't seem to be a tactic Starfleet favored, however.

Reaching her assigned quarters, she shucked her jacket onto the bed and headed for the terminal. This commission work was just until she could update her engineering qualifications. Earth was a beautifully alien world, with its bizarre cuisine and smoothed-out humans, but she hadn't abandoned her entire race just to trade one color of sky for another.

There was a whole galaxy out there. There were, she'd found, ships - not unlike the _Enterprise_ , but usually smaller - whose entire task was to explore the stars, meet new races.

_That_ was where she belonged.

Being the only member of her race that wasn't on her native planet, and a designated cultural refugee, helped somewhat. Starfleet Academy was an investment of several years, and it was understood that her race just wasn't _that_ long-lived; she'd tested out of many courses and was taking the rest via private instruction. Usual? No. Hardly. But then, nothing about Mirasta Yale's situation was all that _usual_ ; statistically, she was in a minority rather smaller than a hundredth of a percent of Federation citizens.

Her memoirs were, she'd been told, of immense scientific value; her people would, after all, _eventually_ be ready to seek the stars, just as she now sought them. She'd been told that the Federation would be pleased to preserve her writings to present to her people when they were ready to receive them. The idea amused her; that when the first astronauts of her people broke the warp barrier, when the first Malconians peered past the boundaries of their own solar system...why, they'd find Mirasta Yale had beaten them to it by centuries.

When she wrote, she wrote to them. Those distant, as-yet-unborn astronauts, who would have every reason to feel they were the first. And they would be; they'd be the first true explorers of the Malconian race, because true exploration wasn't just about seeing new worlds. It was about bringing those worlds _home_ , and that was something Mirasta Yale would never be able to do. Not in her lifetime. Picard, and later his superiors, had been quite clear; the Malconians had requested that the Federation depart, and were scaling back their space exploration until they were culturally ready to accept the reality of other races. Mirasta's writings, detailing encounters with all the races of the Federation she'd met thus far, would - if delivered _now_ \- cause riots in the streets.

So when Mirasta wanted to write home, tell someone about all the things she'd seen and experienced that was so _normal_ for all the beings around her, she wrote to the men and women as yet unborn, the Malconians who would truly be 'first' to tell their people about the universe.

Sometimes, she wrote them apologies. After all, she knew quite well the sensation of excitement at sharing a thing wondrous and new to herself with another. She'd spoken with the other cultural refugees on the Commission and sometimes she'd even been able to help them find something in the databanks, figure out how to do something on these unfamiliar computer systems and alien technologies. It was a daily thrill, this encountering of the new, and she rather thought some of those unborn Malconian explorers would feel she'd stolen their thunder.

Tonight, in between studying engineering texts for her next exam, she wrote letters. Just letters. About the food in the commissary, about some of the students in her class, about trying to convince the replicators to make Malconian food. On another screen, she was preparing a white paper on warp technology - certainly she was still a student, but having been part of a team developing warp technology from scratch, she had a somewhat different approach to the systems from those who'd grown up with starships. She had high hopes of the paper; she'd rather grown to like Starfleet engineers.

By the time she'd finished her studies and her letters for the day - the paper would take a few more weeks yet - the sun had set. She pushed the terminal away from her, then, and walked out onto her quarters' small balcony.

Alien skies were all right, but what tugged at her heart were alien stars.

They came out slowly - Earth was a fairly light-polluted planet still - but she could see them, the alien constellations. The computer had helpfully tried telling her which of the stars was her native sun, but it was too dim and near the horizon from her current location to see, most nights. 

She rarely looked for it. What was the point in traveling two thousand or more light years from home, just to wave at it from your porch every night? There were so many more interesting things to see. Mirasta quite enjoyed identifying the stars and then mentally tagging each one with people she'd met from that system. 

Oh, the universe was vast, beautifully vast. She'd never get time to visit them all, but she was certainly going to _try_.

~*~

In the year 2570 - by Earth standards - the Malconian prototype warp vessel _Nova_ initiated formal First Contact in the Garth system, with Starfleet science vessel _Dauntless_ , who'd been surveying the system.

The captain, one Janus Toggert, on searching the computer banks for any information on the Malconians, came up with a book and a holonovel written by a Mirasta Yale some two hundred years before, and presented both to her cultural descendants as a welcoming gift.

The crew of the _Nova_ were, perhaps understandably, a tad put off by this, but accepted the gift.

Starting the ancient holonovel program, they found an undeniable image of a Malconian standing in the empty holosuite. _"To my people, welcome,"_ the image began. _"I'm so glad you're finally ready to join the universe. By the time you read this - or see it, I am still adjusting to this holonovel idea - I am likely long dead, but my writings are my gift to you..."_


End file.
